Theresa the super trouper Theresa May was depicted as Bellatrix Lestrange, an evil witch in Harry Potter, on the Christmas card for Keith Vaz’s home affairs select committee last year, so the home secretary has got off lightly on the latest one. Given a blonde wig and white ruffed bell-bottoms

When Jeremy met Johnny The obituaries of Jeremy Thorpe focused on his flair and that dog incident, but none mentioned the role that the Liberal leader played in transforming John Lydon from snotty Sex Pistols anarchist to the nation’s favourite butter salesman. In his autobiography, Anger is an

Every time that the Queen returns to Buckingham Palace from a weekend away, she is greeted by a little reminder of one of her greatest loves — a posy of half a dozen freshly cut flowers from her garden. Alan Titchmarsh, who will present the two-part ITV series The Queen’s Garden over Christmas

Tanks for a laugh, Boris When Dylan Jones became editor of GQ 15 years ago, one of his first hirings was Boris Johnson as motoring correspondent. “Yikes! Are you sure?” was apparently Boris’s response. Jones says that the blond Mr Toad then racked up a “ludicrous amount of parking tickets” as a

Forty years after his death, PG Wodehouse is experiencing a renaissance, helped by the West End success of Perfect Nonsense (a Jeeves and Wooster play now touring the country) and Sebastian Faulks’s well-received “continuation” novel homage, Jeeves and the Wedding Bells. Eager to encourage new

Paxman taken for a sucker Jeremy Paxman has harangued most of the leading political figures of the past 30 years, but the one he chose to recall at the Political Cartoon of the Year awards this week was an odd encounter with the Dalai Lama, which began with the Lama expounding on the evils of

Bottled water on tap for Balls The Tories are fond of attacking Labour’s profligacy in office, but there was one area in which money was saved. When Ed Balls left the Treasury in 2004 after seven years as Gordon Brown’s henchman, his secretary made a confession. “You know every day you’ve had a

Some people when asked to list the signs of a successful life might suggest having the spare time to read widely and the wit to solve the Times crossword. Not those asked by a home-improvement company, evidently, where conspicuous consumption of wealth is still what matters. According to 2,000

That vodoo that they do One of the joys of The Archers is that no one talks about Ukip in the Bull, even though there was that influx of Hungarians a while back. Ambridge does not lack its grumblers, however. The Radio 4 soap’s recent spate of exiling, killing, recasting or just silencing

What MPs will do for a dare... The admission by Penny Mordaunt, the Tory MP and sailors’ favourite, that she gave a speech on poultry welfare just to win a bet that she could say “cock” in the Commons attracted uproar in the usual places, but it’s nothing new. In his autobiography, John Major